Bach Sonatas And Partitas

Gone are the days when Kazuhito Yamashita amazed and delighted us with his remarkable transcriptions of "Pictures at an exhibition" or Dvorak's "New World" transcription. 53 years later (Yamashita was born in 1961) has reached impeccable artistic maturity. His prodigious musicality and remarkable virtuosity can be evidenced throughout this double album.

Fascinating performers and audiences alike with their architectural perfection as well as their emotional range, these are works that lend themselves to very different interpretations, and on this recording it is the Bach of Finnish violinist Jaakko Kuusisto we hear. Himself a composer – as well as violinist and conductor – Kuusisto remembers beginning to study individual movements from the set at the age of ten. The music has been with him ever since, and to him ‘no other works for the violin provide a higher challenge or greater beauty’.

Bach’s remarkable Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin are revered for their boundless inventiveness, technical ingenuity and emotional depth. With their brilliant preludes, stately dances and complex four-part fugues, the demands on the performer are enormous – from rapid scale passages, double stopping and arpeggios, to the skill and concentration required to create the illusion of separately moving and interweaving voices.

The sonatas and partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001–1006) are a set of six works composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. They are sometimes referred to in English as the sonatas and partias for solo violin in accordance with Bach's headings in the autograph manuscript: "Partia" (plural "Partien") was commonly used in German-speaking regions during Bach's time, whereas the Italian "partita" was introduced to this set in the 1879 Bach Gesellschaft edition, having become standard by that time. The set consists of three sonatas da chiesa in four movements and three partitas (or partias) in dance-form movements.

Nathan Milstein plays these magnificent pieces with patrician elegance, easily overcoming their all-but-insurmountable difficulties. His burnished tone has a warmth like that of mahogany, and his fine fingerwork and flawless bowing make for an assured connection of ideas. In the Chaconne to the D minor Partita–which can make even a very good violinist sound overmatched and inept–he zeroes in with the sort of concentration one usually sees in chess champions. Here, as elsewhere in the cycle, Milstein projects not only the music's emotive force, but Bach's grand architecture as well.

Tenenbaum is a very ardent musician whose Bach is irresistibly expressive, overwhelmingly passionate, and unreservedly loving. Tenenbaum has known the Sonatas & Partitas since she was a child and her interpretations are the results of her long and profound intimacy with the music. As in a great marriage, Tenenbaum knows everything there is to know about the Sonatas & Partitas and she knows the music has depths that reveal themselves only when the player surrenders to them.